Reply #44: jobycom, you are really talking through your hat!

[Peace Patriot]

"Elections are counted at the local level."

Elections are NOT counted at the local level. The electRONs that have been stirred up and are zinging around inside a BLACK BOX are zinged off to central tabulators, where they zing around inside another BLACK BOX, and, at some point, somebody asks the machine for a "result." We have NO IDEA--nor even does our Sec of State or any official in the election process--what all that zinging around inside the BLACK BOX looks like, or what it is doing to these so-called votes (electrons).

And it is just as easy as it can be to insert a few lines of programming code into that electrical environment before, during and even after the voting, to make the zings spit out whatever "result" you may desire, leaving absolutely no trace that you have done so. This has been demonstrated time and again, most recently in Florida, with Diebold optiscans, which the local election head then banned from his county, saying that he was also suspicious of the other major vendor, ES&S.

Audit recounts--where they even exist--"count" one percent of the vote, at best. In the one third of the country that had no paper trail in 2004, not even this was possible. In areas that have only a "paper trail"--not a real paper ballot--they can arbitrarily discard the "recount" results (favor the machine over the "paper trail"). As happened in Ohio, supposed random recounts can be directed by partisan officials in non-random ways, making the recount meaningless. Substantial recounts are extremely expensive and extremely rare.

There are virtually no audit/recount controls on the "results" produced by these electrons zinging around inside BLACK BOXES.

And now I get to the good part. The code that directs these electrons around inside the BLACK BOXES is owned as 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY information--which no one, not even our sec's of state, have a right to review--mainly by three corporations, all of whom have close connections to the Bush regime and to the Republican Party, including a Bush/Cheney campaign chair and a billionaire funder of far rightwing causes.

Two of these Bushite corporations--Diebold and ES&S, run by two brothers--tabulated 80% of the vote in 2004, using 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code.

This condition is so NON-TRANSPARENT as to inspire analogy to Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany.

Non-transparent elections are not elections. They are tyranny.

Period.

The question is not, could they?, did they?, how feasible might it have been?. The question is, how the hell did these Bushites get SECRET programming control of the tabulation of our votes?

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"Even if we went back to paper ballots, there would be cheating."

Never, in the history of elections, has it been possible to steal millions of votes, at the speed of light, leaving no trace, and with no one in the public venue having the right to review those operations. One hacker, a couple of minutes. That's all it takes.

With paper ballots, SOMEBODY has to throw them away or change them. A paper ballot is a concrete object. You can see it. You can touch it. And anything that is done with it is potentially visible to the human eye, and to objective observers. Furthermore, its bulk prevents massive stealing. An electron has no bulk. It can be 'disappeared' or changed by the thousands, by the millions, instantly, leaving no trace.

Those are the two huge differences. Scale. And inherent invisibility.

Really, we might as well have given all the votes to Karl Rove, and let him take them all into a White House basement, and count them in secret, come out later and announce who the winner was.

That's how NON-TRANSPARENT our election system has become.